


Nemesis

by wildlingoftarth



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: (genesis the bible story not the band), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Enemies and Lovers, F/M, Humility, Pride, Sins and Virtues, and then they fuck, human personification of sins and virtues, i literally just made some shit up that was vaguely genesis-like, please do not think too much about the mythology of all this, she basically humps him into submission, this whole verse is just them chasing each other around like a tom & jerry cartoon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:35:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26696857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildlingoftarth/pseuds/wildlingoftarth
Summary: When humans arose from the spark of Life begat by the Seven Who Are One, they developed the capacity for great goodness along with great evil. The Seven gave human form to these Sins and Virtues and sent them to live among the humans to maintain the necessary balance of the universe.This is how Brienne finds herself pursuing Jaime. Again.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 39
Kudos: 131
Collections: Jaime x Brienne Week 2020





	Nemesis

The Seven Who Are One have always existed. They are older than time, older than the universe. When the Father and the Mother grew lonely, they joined together as lovers do to create the heavens and the earth. They created light and dark, morning and evening, the skies above and the waters below, for they knew that everything must be in balance. They provided the spark that begat Life, and they and the other Five observed and gently guided this Life to serve their aims. 

When the beings they called humans came into existence, they brought with them many gifts. These creatures had the ability to be kind, pure, selfless, humble, righteous, forgiving, and diligent. But, because there must be a symmetry to all things, they were also capable of great anger, jealousy, pride, over-indulgence, laziness, avarice, and lust. When these Virtues and Sins were in balance, humans flourished and prospered. But when a disparity emerged, they became indolent and warlike and threatened to destroy themselves completely. 

Though the Seven enjoyed observing the skirmishes and conflicts that arose in humans’ day-to-day lives, they would under no circumstances allow humans to annihilate themselves and undo their millennia of toil in creating them. Thus, they gave human form to the Seven Sins and Seven Virtues and tasked them with keeping control over each other to ensure nothing upset the delicate balance of the human world. 

These human-like Sins and Virtues were sent to live in pairs among the humans and “supervise” each other, which nearly always meant the Virtue corralling the Sin into some semblance of control for a brief time before it inevitably eluded the Virtue to wreak havoc once again.

This is how Brienne finds herself in a crowded public square somewhere in Essos on a stifling summer day, surrounded on all sides by a sweaty mass of bodies waving flags and banners and roaring unintelligibly. The frenzy reaches fever pitch when a tall, barrel-chested man, impeccably dressed in a navy suit and mirror-shined shoes, ascends the stage and walks toward the lectern. His pale hair is slicked back, and his filmy, ice-blue eyes look down over the crowd with a mix of satisfaction and barely-disguised derision. 

Brienne has been observing this particular man for a few months now – his specific brand of hubris, narcissism, over-confidence and ability to turn groups of formerly rational people into hysterical mobs has all the earmarks of the _actual_ man she’s looking for. 

She scans the crowd, grateful for once for her excessive height, and spots him just off the side of the stage. 

_Jaime._

He is whispering in the ear of a beautiful blonde woman – probably an advisor to the man on stage – whose smug smile widens and chin raises perceptibly as she listens. 

Just then, Jaime spots Brienne and shoots her a shit-eating grin before crossing his arms and widening his stance, holding his ground. A challenge.

She stares him down for a moment, neither wanting to move first, but she knows from experience that if she doesn’t, they will stand there for millennia. As soon as she begins to move toward him, he whispers something quickly in the woman’s ear and sneaks behind the curtain in the back of the stage. Brienne sighs and quickens her steps to follow him.

This is the life of a Virtue. Always chasing, monitoring, controlling. 

Brienne thinks the Seven must have had a sense of humor to give Humility the form she currently inhabits – the form of an extraordinarily tall, broad, ugly woman. No matter how competent she is, no matter how many disciplines she masters, the world will always knock her down a peg because of the way she looks. She has no choice but to be humble. 

She watches Jaime’s golden waves bounce as he walks briskly across the square toward the entrance to an ornate hotel, stealing a glance back at her before pushing the door open and slipping inside. Jaime is everything Brienne is not - beautiful, charismatic, shining. Arrogant and cocksure. 

Proud. 

Like the other Sins, Jaime relishes the chaos he is able to cause with only a few strategically-whispered words. He plants ideas of superiority and grandiosity in humans’ heads and inflates their egos to the detriment of a greater good. He destroys relationships with a wave of his hand and nurtures spite and deceit and resentment between humans.

But unlike some of his ilk, Jaime has also discovered how to use his qualities to positively impact the beings he lives among, and actually _uses_ them on occasion. Brienne has watched him uplift whole marginalized communities and bring divided countries together. She’s seen him persuade too-modest scholars and scientists and artists to share their gifts with the world. She’s seen him change individual children's lives by simply making them feel important. When Jaime is good, he is _magnificent_.

The Jaime of this particular moment is _not_ what Brienne would call magnificent, even though his looks can always be described as such. He’s given into his baser instincts to sow division and fear through bombastic public personas like the man on the stage, who is now railing against anyone who looks or thinks differently than him. But this is the way of her life, her responsibility – to corral Jaime, appeal to the goodness inside him, try to reverse some of the damage he causes so effortlessly. 

It is what she was made for, and she is good at it, even if their adversarial relationship has become...more complicated over the years.

As she follows Jaime into the hotel, several steps behind him, her body begins to buzz with familiarity. She cannot count how many times they’ve done this, but every time still fills her with anticipation. Brienne approaches the registration desk and ignores the way the eyes of the hotel employee widen as they drag up her body and land on her face. 

She tells him in the local language that a guest left a key for her.

“The guest’s last name?”

“Superbia.”

He presses his lips together in a tight smile and slides her a key card across the desk. “Room 701.” 

Brienne enters the elevator and presses the button for the seventh floor, her heart thumping in her chest. She thinks back, thousands of years in human time, to when she and Jaime were _just_ rivals. They fought with anything back then – words, swords, fists. She pursued him around the world and back again, with the tables turning every so often when he took special exception to her “dullness,” as he put it. Until one day, after a particularly vicious battle, she looked down to where he was pinned under her legs and saw something different in his eyes. Something she knew was dangerous, yet she couldn’t look away. Couldn’t walk away.

The first time, she’d thought it a trick - there was no way, after all, that _he_ could want _her_. The next, perhaps a passing amusement for the easily-bored Jaime. But it kept happening, he kept wanting her, and she couldn't deny how much she wanted him. 

Her rational side had countless reasons why it shouldn’t work - they were complete opposites, after all, rivals tasked by the Seven with keeping each other in check. She'd asked herself many times if she was just using this as a means to keep Jaime occupied, but came to the conclusion that she enjoyed it too much herself for there to be any ulterior motive. Jaime staying out of trouble was just an agreeable side effect. 

Brienne stands in front of room 701, slides the key card into the door and pushes it open gently. 

Jaime is leaning back on his elbows on the bed, tie discarded, shirt open to his navel, an insouciant smirk painting his face. “What took you so long?” His voice is casual, but she knows him well enough now to detect the hint of desperation creeping through. 

She stops just inside the door without bothering to close it, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall nonchalantly even though she wants nothing more than to rush to him. 

“I’ve been busy. Cleaning up your messes.” She gestures out the window toward the plaza. “I have to hand it to you, he’s some of your best work yet.”

Jaime sits up and leans toward her, resting his elbows on his knees. His shirt hangs open, offering a tantalizing glimpse of the hard muscles and golden skin underneath. “I barely did anything. All I had to do was surround him with incompetent yes-men. The work did itself. Now close the door and come here.”

Brienne does as she is bid, watching the bright, shining green of his eyes become obscured by the black pools of his pupils as she walks slowly toward him. When he looks at her, she forgets her meekness, her inclination to fade into the background. She holds her head high and meets his gaze, and the moment she reaches the bed, she does not hesitate before taking his face in her hands and leaning down to capture his mouth with hers. 

Jaime groans in the back of his throat, which she feels deep in her core. He slips his hands around her waist, pulling her down onto his lap, her knees straddling him. Once, she would have worried that she was too big to do this, but she knows now he likes to feel her full weight, likes her long limbs enveloping him.

He kisses her slowly and deeply before moving his mouth to her neck, suckling on the sensitive flesh at the base. “Gods, I missed you,” he breathes against her skin. 

Brienne scratches her nails along his scalp before gripping his hair and tugging his head back firmly. He gazes up at her with a mix of amazement and hunger. "If you really missed me, you would have behaved," she says, smiling down at him before giving his lower lip a playful nip. 

"Let me make it up to you," he rasps between languorous kisses, his tongue teasing all the ways he might try to do just that. 

She works at the remaining buttons of his shirt and pushes it off his shoulders. He pulls hers up and off, then wraps his arms low around her back and draws her closer, pressing her bare skin against his. It feels so good to be with him like this again, to feel his arms around her and his lips on her fluttering pulse. This embrace could almost be enough…if her body didn't respond so readily to his slightest touch. But her hips are already canting toward him, liquid heat pooling between her thighs. 

Brienne shudders as Jaime brushes his fingers down her spine, then slides his hands around her ribcage to cup her breasts. Her nipples have been hard and desperate for touch since she walked into the hotel, and his thumbs brushing against them makes her gasp a sharp “ah.” 

Jaime smirks and dips his head to suck a mark into her collarbone, then moves down to take a nipple into his mouth. Her head flies back, a whimper escaping from her lips. He is impossibly hard underneath her, and she feels his moan rumble through her body when she grinds against him. 

She allows Jaime to flip her over in a move they both enjoy, not least because they know she could do the same to him if she wanted. His feet are still on the floor as he settles his upper body over hers. She wraps her legs around his waist, their pants doing nothing to prevent them from feeling the heat of each other as they roll their hips in time. “Brienne, _fuck_ ,” he murmurs, and though she’s heard her name on his lips countless times, it still sends a thrill down her spine.

Brienne runs her hands along every bit of Jaime’s bare skin – his neck and shoulders, his arms, his muscled chest and stomach. He groans into her mouth when her fingers slip beneath the waistband of his pants, but he pulls away reluctantly to stand between her knees. His gaze roams hungrily from her swollen lips to the scar he gave her on her collarbone, to her bare chest, nipples hard and pink, over every exposed inch of her freckled skin. 

Her natural instinct to cover herself has been thoroughly quieted over these many years, so she keeps her hands at her sides, fingers fisting in the sheets when he leans down to lick a stripe between her breasts. Her back arches off the bed and toward his mouth as he trails indecent open-mouth kisses down her stomach. 

She lifts her hips to allow him to pull her pants and underwear down, her heart hammering, blood hot in her veins. Jaime kneels in front of her and strokes his stubble along the soft flesh of her inner thigh, then flicks his tongue out, so close to where she aches for him. She growls in frustration and feels him smile against her thigh before finally putting his mouth to her. 

The noise that escapes her when he uses his tongue to part her folds, wet and hot and desperate, would embarrass her if she weren’t so thoroughly wrecked with need. Jaime moans a sound of his own when she locks her ankles around his shoulders and arches up off the bed, allowing him to move his hands under her body and pull her closer to his mouth. The way he alternates soft, slow licks with the flat of his tongue and rapid flicks around her clit has her moaning his name in no time at all, and she nearly screams when he closes his lips around the sensitive bud. He _sucks_ , grazes his teeth over her, and she comes apart hard and fast and loud, thighs clenching over his ears. She allows him to lick her softly through her aftershocks, pulling his head away only when his ministrations become too much for her sensitive flesh.

Brienne lays back across the bed, limp and spent; watches him rise and unbutton his pants. He stands naked in front of her, so beautiful and flawless and _hard_ in the late-afternoon sun streaming through the window. She can’t help but think that one of the Seven must have made him in their image – the Warrior, perhaps? – because he is easily the most perfectly-formed human she’s seen in her long existence. She would never tell him that, of course – he knows, as shown by the way he glances appraisingly at himself in the mirror. She snaps her fingers to bring his attention back to her. “Focus, you conceited bastard,” she growls, with narrowed eyes and a smile playing on her lips.

She scoots toward the headboard and Jaime crawls up the bed to her, a predatory grin spreading across his face. “What would you like me to focus on, then?” he taunts before she grabs his face and quiets him with a deep, desperate kiss. The taste of her on his lips and tongue sends a fresh jolt of want between her legs, which fall open in invitation. Jaime settles between them, running his hand along her thigh. She reaches down to stroke him, hard and smooth and pulsing in her hand. “I need you,” she whimpers, guiding him to her entrance. When he slides inside her, both of them sigh with relief. 

"Brienne," he murmurs into her neck, almost a prayer.

Brienne tangles her fingers in his soft hair. "Jaime," she responds in the same reverent tone, so much said in those two utterances.

Sometimes when they do this, it’s equal parts fighting and fucking, a frenzied tangle of arms and legs and mouths battling for dominance. 

Other times, like today, it’s slow and tender, their bodies fitting together as if they were made for each other. Jamie pushes himself deep inside her, holding her close and rocking with a gentle rhythm. Brienne adores this feeling of connection, of the slide and press of their heated skin, and squeezes her legs and arms around him in the way she knows he likes. 

Sparks begin building along Brienne’s spine, a chorus of moans and gasps emanating from her throat, and she digs her heels into his back, urging him deeper, faster. His rhythm becomes more uneven, his breath ragged, their noises mingling in the air. 

Her fingernails dig into the flesh of his shoulders, her body arching up to meet his. He is hot and hard and feels so good inside her that it only takes a nip at her earlobe to shatter her completely. Jaime comes seconds after, roaring and pulsing inside her as she clenches around him. He is usually so controlled, so methodical, that her ability to make him come undone using only her body makes her feel uniquely powerful.

Her hands loosen their grip on his back, her arms and legs become slack and release his body from their grasp. He collapses heavily on top of her, breathing hard, his heart hammering against her chest. Brienne sweeps her hand up and down his spine, chuckling at the shudder that results. She turns her head and mumbles against his shoulder. “I missed you too.”

Jaime snaps his head up. “What was that?”

She slaps his shoulder playfully. “You heard me.”

“I really didn't! Can you repeat that?” he teases, turning his ear toward her.

Brienne sighs heavily. “I _said_ I missed you too.”

She swears he actually _glows_. 

She grabs him and pulls him down for another kiss to prevent being completely overwhelmed by the look on his face.

He slips out of her, rolls off and settles next to her, runs his finger absentmindedly up and down her arm. 

She closes her eyes and relishes the contact, then opens them again and looks over at him. “I have to go out for a little while,” she says before she can give into the temptation to climb on top of him. “ _Promise_ me you’ll behave?”

Jaime holds up his hand in a mock pledge, an exaggerated look of sincerity on his face. “I _promise_. I don’t know if I could get up right now anyway - I think you fucked all the strength out of me.”

Brienne’s face blazes despite the fact that he was just inside her. She tries and fails to shoot him an annoyed look before rolling off the bed to get dressed, then steals a glance back at him before she will slip out the door to tie up some loose ends. He lazes back on the bed, the white hotel sheet in stark contrast to his bronzed skin. Her heart still speeds up when he turns those sharp green eyes toward her.

“You’re coming back tonight, right?” he asks, his tone light but with a barely-repressed hint of concern.

“Of course,” she replies softly. Even though she’ll spend her entire existence undoing his efforts, she’ll never say no to coming back to his bed at the end of the day.

This is the game they’ve made out of their millennia-old rivalry – weeks or months of chasing and being chased, followed by a few days of physical and emotional bliss before the cycle starts again. But they can’t stop – the Seven have made them for this purpose, and they would rather not find out what happens when the Seven get angry. Besides, even though she doesn’t relish being away from him for so long, Brienne quite enjoys this constant push and pull, and suspects Jaime does, too.

The next day, from the tangled nest they've made of the bedsheets, Brienne turns on the TV to see the man on stage surrounded by flashing cameras and reporters, attempting to cover his face with his hands. The humiliating leak of photos of him in several compromising positions with a young woman of questionable age has put his political career _and_ his status as a free man in jeopardy.

“Foiled again,” Jaime says flatly, sweeping his fingers up and down Brienne’s side.

Brienne chuckles. "No more politicians for a while though, yeah?”

Jaime huffs like a reprimanded child. “Fine. There’s a billionaire business scion in King’s Landing I’ve had my eye on. Is that better?”

“Hmm. I haven’t been to King’s Landing in a while. That could work.”

“I’ll race you there.”

“I’ll win.”

He smiles and presses a kiss to her forehead. “You always do.”

**Author's Note:**

> I will give you one (1) guess as to whom this politician was based on.  
> “Superbia” is the Latin word for pride (Latin exists in this verse okay?)  
> A million thanks to my stellar beta, lewispanda!


End file.
